At Growth By Design, we believe intentional choices lead to impactful growth, whether you’re shaping a thriving organization or a meaningful life. Here, we provide the practical information, tools, and frameworks to get you there. Today we’re exploring the fifth and final phase of the human behavior change continuum, Maintenance, to round out our understanding of what is truly necessary in order for us to change a behavior and sustain it over time.

---

In the transtheoretical model of behavior change, the fifth and final stage – Maintenance – is the stage that looks mundane – you’ve made this a part of your life so much so that it is a core of your being. Maintenance is the stage where the new behavior is no longer a short-term push but part of how you operate. For long-term goals (like leadership style, culture, or health) this is where the real payoff lives.

What Maintenance Really Is

In maintenance, you have sustained your new behavior for at least 6 months and are working to prevent relapse and integrate the change into your identity. The behavior is more habitual, less effortful, but still requires deliberate attention in high-risk situations. Think of a leader who has spent a year holding consistent development-focused 1:1s and now sees them as a non-negotiable part of their role, not an optional extra.

Why Maintenance is Often Overlooked

Early action can feel exhilarating, but it is also fragile. Research on TTM shows that Many systems celebrate early wins and then move on, leaving people without support during the critical consolidation period. TTM research emphasizes maintenance as a distinct stage with its own tasks: avoiding relapse, reinforcing the benefits, and continually re-aligning with values and identity. Without this, changes can fade when stress spikes, leadership changes, or organizational priorities shift.

The Relapse Trap

TTM recognizes relapse as a common, not catastrophic, part of the change process. People often cycle through stages multiple times, learning with each iteration. Long-term maintenance is supported by:

• Integration of the behavior into self-concept (“this is who I am now”)
• Ongoing self-efficacy (confidence in handling high-risk situations)
• Continued use of coping strategies and environmental supports

Practical Steps You Can Take Today (If You’re in Maintenance)

If you’ve kept your goal behavior going for months, your work now is to protect and evolve it.

• Review and refresh your “why”
  • Reflect on how this change has impacted your energy, relationships, or results.
  • Update your goals to stay challenging and meaningful, not stagnant. Stagnation can easily slip into boredom, which can lead to relapse!
• Identify high-risk situations
  • Make a list: travel, crunch periods, leadership changes, holidays.
  • For each, design a scaled-back “minimum viable behavior” and an if-then plan.
• Institutionalize your habits
  • Turn repeated behaviors into standards: recurring calendar blocks, team norms, documented processes.
  • Share your practices with others, because teaching reinforces your own commitment.
• Allow for relapse without shame
  • If you slip, label it as data, not defeat: “What conditions contributed? What will I adjust next time?”

Hey Leaders, Here are a Few Tips You Can Use to Embed Maintenance into Your Culture

Sustainable change requires that organizations move beyond campaigns and initiatives.

• Shift from heroic effort to designed systems
  • Make it easier to act in line with the new behavior than to revert. For example, default meeting templates that include purpose and outcomes, or performance reviews that reward people-centric behaviors.
• Build people-centric reinforcement
  • Recognize and reward behaviors that reflect the desired culture (coaching, collaboration, learning) rather than only short-term outputs.
• Treat change as continuous
  • Reinforce that maintenance is not “holding still” but iterating: periodically refine goals, rituals, and processes as the organization and context evolve.

If you have crushed your New Years goals and are tracking toward maintenance, your work now and for the remainder of the year is to ask: “How do I protect what I have built, and what’s the next level of this behavior for me and my team?”

For me, understanding the TTM has helped me have more patience with myself for the things I don’t want to start, more compassion for myself for the goals I fall short of, and more excitement to renew my commitment to continuous growth. It is my hope that whether or not you started 2026 with a robust list of resolutions, understanding these key phases of how we as humans progress through changing our behavior will help you in your day to day life.

Onward and upward!
Katie